Originally it was supposed to be filled by the IPA client join process to 'uname -m' value. ipa-join tools still sends it to the server but the value is ignored completely by the join process. As the result, nsHardwarePlatform attribute is never set on the host object.

I don't see any code in IPA itself that would rely on the content of nsHardwarePlatform attribute. We have web UI tests upstream that modify the field to test that you can modify it but that's all.

We saw one request from a customer last year that asked which attributes they can use to mark an OS platform name and we suggested them to use 'nshardwareplatform' as one of options.

So I am not sure whether we should set this or not. ;)

When we originally speced out hosts we added attributes for OS version and platform so when I wrote this a gazillion years ago I was looking to automate things as much as possible. A lot of things then were aspirational, sort of a solution looking for a problem. I think the idea was that it would help with inventory, particularly if you had mixed machines (like some Sparc, AIX, etc) you would be able to find them easily in IPA.

I don't have any specific memories for why this wasn't implemented in the join API, it very well could have been an oversight and I didn't notice because it is so edge case.

master:

• 8f640f8672f2bec7b560a2838e2451a190abf6cf Populate nshardwareplatform and nsosversion during join operation

ipa-4-8:

• 92ef9d1706c331b674eced04a3485de24c200998 Populate nshardwareplatform and nsosversion during join operation